APA DSM-5 Gender Dysphoria: A Kinder, Gentler Machine Gun Hand

Most all of us who have come to a point in our lives where we feel our transition has been successful, all have one common problem.

Much of the world doesn't recognize or respect our gender expression.

So we are happy, or like me still thrilled, to look in the mirror, to see the external changes. To sit quietly reflecting on our internal growth and the amazing interpersonal relationships which have since sprouted.

To know in my heart this is who my artistic first wife saw when she drew a picture of who she knew I would be in my mature years. No one including myself believed I could be such a wise intuitive soul, but she did.

Much of the world still doesn't know. It's been a battle extraordinaire fighting for my life at the first full time job since transitioning in 2007. Yes five years.

I am winning. I am being grudgingly granted respect by the last of the management holdouts, not because of any revelation on their part, but because I am a person of extraordinaire worth to the company.

A hybrid of sorts. Physically enabled like a athletic man, yet with accessibility of a woman and with the compassion and understanding of a mother. A hybrid gender.

So in a nutshell, I am happy even ecstatic. Then what was holding me back?

"social role dysphoria"

I can't blame all the hardships I have endured getting to this point on the APA, the people largely responsible for creating a social toxic atmosphere, but I will say if they stopped adding gas to the haters fire, the air would start to clear.

Kelly Winters who authors GID Reform doesn't advocate for a total reform arguing that retention would continue to aid many who's insurance covers transitional needs. In all my life I have yet to shake one of those peoples hands, but hey, I know you are out there. But what about the vast majority of us?

Kelly Winters offers these brilliant observations:

"Transitioned individuals who are highly functional and happy with their lives are forever diagnosable as mentally disordered under flawed criteria that reference characteracterics and assigned roles of natal sex rather than current status. For example, a post-transition adult who is happy in her or his affirmed role, wants to be treated like others of her/his affirmed gender, has typical feelings of those in her/his affirmed gender, and is distressed or unemployed because of external societal prejudice will forever meet criteria A (subcriteria 4, 5 and 6) and B and remain subject to false-positive diagnosis, regardless of how successfully her or his distress of gender dysphoria has been relieved."

Then she goes on to address the rigid gender stereotyping at the crux of the issue:

The criteria for children are slightly improved over the DSM-IV-TR, in that they can no longer be diagnosed on the basis of gender role nonconformity alone. However, the proposed criteria are unreasonably reliant on gender stereotype nonconformity. Five of eight proposed subcriteria for children are strictly based on gender role nonconformity, with no relevance to the definition of mental disorder. Behaviors and emotions considered ordinary or even exemplary for other (cisgender) children are mis-characterized as pathological for gender variant youth. This sends a harmful message that equates gender variance with sickness. As a consequence, children will continue to be punished, shamed and harmed for nonconformity to assigned birth roles.

So essentially the APA has recognized they are killing us and are seeing if they can get away with using a kinder more gentle machine gun hand.

Stop killing us! Please sign the petition demanding the APA remove Trans From The DSM-5, Yours is the voice they can't deny. Yours is the kick in the pants that's bringing the undeniable truth out of the shadows.

The APA has lone profited from our deaths. No More Machine Gun Hand.

Alternating Gender Incongruent Transsexuals, All-ee All-ee In Come Free!

Gender fluid peeps, the waters fine!

For too long the right wing has repeatedly tried tearing off pieces of our trans umbrella mangling the truth and maligning those gender fluid peeps (GFP) who identify as male, female, asexual or a variety of other expressions, depending on when you ask them.

The ease which some move between gender expressions is oil for the 'not in my shower' and a wayward transphobic splinter faction of feminism, radfem's fear mongering machines.

Time after time while we advanced inclusive legislation they never missed a opportunity to fail miserably trying to validate outrageous lies about transgender people. "Radfems" only insinuate, not having justifiable cause but the Not in My Shower crew makes movies and mounts campaigns presenting us as threatening to innocent children in restrooms.

And I will admit, that while I stand proudly under our umbrella, I never pointed explicitly to GFP's while advocating for our inclusion in public accommodation provisions bills. But nether has other advocates from our community, to my knowledge. I should have more faith in these individuals for even if they are different from me in the way that didn't stop me from loving one as I had never loved before. I still love you Deborah, after all these years.

My trepidation in being inclusive has no more basis in fact than does the "not in my showers assertions".

The intellectual community is leading our way out of the shadows. This Scientific American article asks whether You Can Be a Man in the Morning and a Woman at Night using the on going study by the Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California paper "Alternating gender incongruity: A new neuropsychiatric syndrome providing insight into the dynamic plasticity of brain-sex" for empirical proof.

Transgender gender fluidity is a naturally occurring phenomenon the same as my static gender incongruence.

All-ee All-ee In Come Free everyone!